ADA Honest Discussion: Accessible Social Media

LYNN WEHRMAN: We want to welcome everybody to our ADA Honest Discussions webinar on accessible social media. I was sharing with our panelists today that it was a bit of a challenge to find government communication people who were willing to come on this panel and talk about social media, because a lot of people are really feeling that they are at the beginning of this.

LYNN WEHRMAN: But we have some really smart folks in the room today who I think are going to be able to help you a lot. My name is Lynn Wehrman. I am the founder and president of Digital Accessibility by WeCo. We are a mission-based company of digital accessibility specialists. One of our job requirements is to live with a disability to be able to do the work.

LYNN WEHRMAN: This webinar is part of a free public series where we offer free information because we are a mission-based company. We have two panelists with us today, Abby Tekiela and Valerie Lockhart. I am going to ask each of you to introduce yourselves. Abby, could you start us off?

ABBY TEKIELA: Absolutely. Thanks, Lynn. I’m Abby Tekiela. I work for the South Washington Watershed District.

LYNN WEHRMAN: It’s okay. It’s a fun last name. It’s the fun way to pronounce it.

ABBY TEKIELA: I’m the water resources program manager at the South Washington Watershed District. We work to protect and restore natural water resources in lower Washington County.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Great. And Valerie?

VALERIE LOCKHART: I’m Valerie Lockhart. I have a company called Ninja Media. I also have a nonprofit that I work with called the Minnesota Tech Network, and I have been in non-government communications for about 15 years on the social media side of things. I have also worked with lots of government organizations as clients. I’m happy to be here.

LYNN WEHRMAN: In full transparency, Valerie does not do our social media, but she is one of our business analysts and she is also our videographer. Welcome, everyone. Abby, could you start us off by sharing a little bit about your background in accessibility? How did you get to be the social media person, and what was your journey like getting started in social media with accessibility?

ABBY TEKIELA: Absolutely. Starting in January of 2025, that’s when I first attended a WeCo presentation with you, Lynn. That is when the journey of learning about accessibility got started for me. In my role at South Washington Watershed District, I manage our social media, so there was an obvious connection between web accessibility and social media accessibility. That is where things started getting going for me. Then it evolved into our website, our documentation, and all of those wonderful things that we got to work on and make accessible.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Okay. Valerie, what was your journey in all of this?

VALERIE LOCKHART: It was a little bit of learning on the go, I would say. I started out in communications many years ago working with nonprofits that worked with people with disabilities. I got experience that way when I was brand new to social media and communications, learning what people actually need in order to access information.

VALERIE LOCKHART: From there, when I started my business, I was working with clients that had all sorts of public-facing communications needs. I went to school for web development and learned about HTML structure and how those things are related to accessibility. From there, working with WeCo and some other organizations, it has been a passion of mine to make sure that no matter what the information is, it is accessible to as many people as possible, even if it is not government mandated. It has been learning by fire and from feedback from real users. That is the way I have learned and honed that part of it.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Valerie, your background has also been in public cable television, correct?

VALERIE LOCKHART: Yes. I did not talk about that. MTN was the public access television provider for the City of Minneapolis for 35 years, and I have worked with that organization for the last 15. We are no longer the public access provider, but having that experience of making sure the public has access to both the content that is on the air and the ability to publish content on the air gave me both perspectives. You have to be able to digest information and share information. You kind of have to have two-way accessibility going on with that.

LYNN WEHRMAN: I think our listeners are going to find that interesting. Abby, could you describe the approach your organization is taking toward the Title II ADA web rule and social media, and what your role is in that?

ABBY TEKIELA: Absolutely. The approach we are taking is sort of like a firehose. We are getting all the information as quickly as possible and trying to implement it as quickly as possible. Fortunately, with the extension of the deadline, we were able to expand how we are going to approach this and have more time to practice.

ABBY TEKIELA: We are using this last year as a moment to practice how to implement this in everyday work. At an individual level, that means building habits. At an organizational level, we are taking the approach of having an accessibility gatekeeper. I am the person on staff who knows the most, or has this as a focus, about how we need to implement accessibility within our website, documents, and social media.

ABBY TEKIELA: When another staff member has something they want to put online for our organization, it goes through me. I am able to assess it in some way and identify parts that need to be updated or changed. We are also looking at it in a future context, knowing that these rules are not going to go away. We need to take on the responsibility of learning how to implement the guidelines within our work and navigate what resources we can start implementing.

ABBY TEKIELA: We are working with a new web developer, which has coincided with our new management plan. That is a large state statute document that we have to create every 10 years, and it basically manages everything we are going to do for the next decade. That also rolls into how we manage PDFs, remediate PDFs, and determine what goes and what stays.

ABBY TEKIELA: On an individual professional level, I have worked with colleagues within the watershed district world to give them a heads-up that we need to be looking at this and preparing. It is funny; I do not think folks were really aware of these rules until only a few months ago. Again, the extension really helps. I am working within my industry to spread the word about what is coming and what we need to do to prepare.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Your organization is really trying to build sustainability into the planning. This is not just a reactionary response. It is, how do we maintain accessibility going forward?

ABBY TEKIELA: Precisely. Yes.

LYNN WEHRMAN: What does your education path regarding social media accessibility look like, Abby?

ABBY TEKIELA: I mentioned before that I attended my first WeCo presentation with you, and that is where it got started. As far as individual resources, I access the WeCo website a lot for different things you have available there.

ABBY TEKIELA: I also look to the state for recommendations. As a local government unit, I feel most confident looking to our higher legislative power to give us recommendations on how to follow through. I use the Minnesota IT Services social media guide. I also use the WCAG quick reference guide with the filtering options, where you can go through by version, level, topic, and tags. Those are the resources I rely on heavily. I also use YouTube and try to see what other people are saying and learn visually, because I learn best visually.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Great. Valerie, I would like to know more about how you educated yourself. You are on the end of trying to deliver accessible communications as a profession. How did you teach yourself, and where did you learn?

VALERIE LOCKHART: I think it started in learning the structure of the web. Learning how websites are structured and what the back end of things looks like helped me understand the infrastructure that people are engaging with. From there, I learned about the WCAG rules. I am glad, Abby, that you brought up the quick reference guide, because that is a super helpful reference where you can find a lot of the answers.

VALERIE LOCKHART: Then, working with people with disabilities: learning from them, seeing how they engage with things, and taking that information in and enveloping it into my practices has been really meaningful. There are so many things I just would not have known without talking to people who are having that experience. Getting feedback, taking it to heart, and actually implementing changes has been the way I have learned the most.

LYNN WEHRMAN: You said something that is really crucial. Back in the days of the horse and buggy, when I was doing digital accessibility in 2008 and no one knew what it was, it was actually Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act that we were trying to comply with, not the ADA web rule, although everybody called it the ADA.

LYNN WEHRMAN: What I started to catch on to with myself and the people I was attempting to teach was that they saw accessibility as a mystical thing that happens that you are not really going to understand. When I was able to break down how a screen reader worked and what I had witnessed in the real experience of screen reader users, people started to get it.

LYNN WEHRMAN: The famous story I tell is that I was sitting in the living room of one of our ADA transition plan board members who used a screen reader. She was on the website and on the navigation menu. It said something like, bus bar, train bar. She said, “What is a bar doing on DOT’s website?” It was a visual separator without a null tag. I tell that story and people get it. It is taking the time to understand how the user is really interacting. You do not have to understand code to get it, and that makes it so much easier.

VALERIE LOCKHART: I do think the first time you see someone using a screen reader and see them get stuck in a loop because of something that you have made, that is such a horrifying experience that you will do anything to not have that happen again. It is disturbing to see someone not be able to get out of something to get to the information they want. It is something that we, as sighted users, do not even think about. It is really eye-opening to experience that with someone and understand the implications of what you are putting out into the world and how it actually hits and engages people.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Understanding that people take in information with just their ears or just their fingers if they are deafblind and using a braille laptop — and understanding how that connects with what you are putting out, including social media posts — matters.

LYNN WEHRMAN: I am going to share a screen and jump into the basics, because we know we have a lot of viewers who are interested in the simple things they can do for accessibility. This is a handout we created for the Texas Association of Municipal Information Officers. A few weeks ago, we taught a full workshop on all aspects of digital accessibility down in Austin, and this was our practical guide. Abby, could you talk us through the basic things you do day in and day out, and the basic things people could start doing?

ABBY TEKIELA: Totally. The first and easiest thing I started with was when I am posting online, specifically Facebook. We use Facebook a lot because at the local government level, that is where most of our audience is. It is also the easiest for information sharing. Instagram is not as great and does not reach audiences in the same way Facebook does.

ABBY TEKIELA: Typically, when I am posting on Facebook, if I am posting a graphic, I take all the critical information from the infographic and put it into the text body of the actual post. That way, if someone is using a screen reader, it is picked up instead of just being a picture. That is really easy, and I think it actually makes the post look more professional.

ABBY TEKIELA: I have also seen folks do image descriptions at the bottom of the post, and I do this sometimes. It is one of the things that, unfortunately, when I am moving quickly, I do not always remember to do. But I am incorporating it more and more. Even when I am not posting an infographic and I am just posting a picture, I add a brief image description at the bottom of the post so folks can see that as well.

ABBY TEKIELA: Other things: again, with Facebook and all social media platforms, I try to use the posting resources as intended. I am not getting creative. For example, if I am posting an event, I use each of the boxes: name of the event, date, start time, end time, location, and all of that information. I use it as intended because those resources are able to be picked up by screen readers and other tools. They cannot necessarily pick up a picture of an infographic that you use to advertise the event.

ABBY TEKIELA: I am also learning more about the limitations of all the social media platforms we use. For example, on Instagram, I avoid posting a link in the caption of an Instagram post, because it is not hyperlinked. Instagram does not allow you to do that, which is such a bummer. You also cannot copy and paste an Instagram caption from mobile, and that is where most people are looking at Instagram, on their phone. You could do it in a roundabout way on an iPhone with a screenshot, but I do not know the extent of that tool for folks using accessibility tools. It is an unnecessary step, and it looks silly to have a link in your Instagram caption that is not hyperlinked.

VALERIE LOCKHART: Can I bring you back on that a little bit? I know some people use third-party platforms to post to social media. Those tools can be great to post the same thing to multiple channels at once and save time. But nine times out of ten, the accessibility tool is not built into that post. You cannot control the alt text on a lot of them when you are posting a photo.

VALERIE LOCKHART: In my practice, I go into the platform that it is going into and post directly in that platform so I am not relying on a scheduler that does not have all the pieces needed for accessibility. To your point, you cannot put a link in Instagram captions, but if you go into Instagram and post a story, you can embed a link. There are ways, but you cannot schedule it from a third-party tool to do things like that. There is give and take. You might not be able to save the time, but you are making things more accessible for people. Thank you for letting me throw that in.

ABBY TEKIELA: That is a good thing to be aware of.

LYNN WEHRMAN: It is hard because it is not one size fits all. You are busy, so how do you streamline that?

VALERIE LOCKHART: I personally just set aside the time. As I create content for different channels, I make sure I set aside the time to go into each platform and post and set things up the way they need to be set up for that platform. It does take more time, but ultimately you get a better result and a better outcome.

VALERIE LOCKHART: With YouTube, I personally feel like Facebook and YouTube are probably the most accessed platforms that people are searching, especially for government entities. That is where people are getting information. They are not necessarily going to your website. Your channels on those two platforms alone are probably the more important ones to focus on. There are so many good tools embedded in those platforms that you need to use, and it is worth the time. I just make the time.

LYNN WEHRMAN: We should probably jump back a little bit to talk more about the ADA web rule requirements. Abby, I am going to pass this over to you. What are you focusing on right now with those real requirements?

ABBY TEKIELA: Right now we are focusing really heavily on PDFs. Like any good government website, we have a whole lot of PDFs. There are so many of them. It is a twofold process. First, determining what we need to get rid of and what we do not need. Then, for what we are keeping, figuring out how to remediate those.

LYNN WEHRMAN: I am going to do a little redirect because we did an ADA Honest Discussions webinar on PDFs last month. We have a recording on PDFs that you can find on our website. But Abby, how about with social media?

ABBY TEKIELA: With social media, that is a tough one. Because it is just me doing social media, a lot of it is me learning how to implement this and learning how to work with partners when we do collaborative social media posts. Fortunately, at a government level, we are often working with other government partners who are subject to the same requirements, but not always.

ABBY TEKIELA: Sometimes we work with engineering firms or private companies to create content. With that kind of thing, a lot of what we are doing is having honest conversations with our regular repeat partners about wanting to make sure we hit these accessibility points in the social media sphere. We explain what we need from them explicitly. This helps us reach the most folks possible, and from a business perspective, it helps their business be exposed to more people.

ABBY TEKIELA: Right now, we are focusing on practicing. We are using this year to practice every time we post: add the alt text, add the caption description at the bottom of the post, add the infographic information into the body of the post, and include all of that information. That is the direction we are working in right now.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Is there anything regarding social media and the ADA that you are concerned about? Anything you have always done in social media that you know now violates the web rule and you are trying to figure out how to do differently?

ABBY TEKIELA: I would not say it is things we have always done, because our organization is a little different. We did not have an education and outreach department until I arrived about two years ago. What I worry about most is how quickly social media platforms change and how often tools that were once provided are suddenly taken away, or different things are added that I do not always have time to understand.

ABBY TEKIELA: For example, I think Instagram implemented something new recently — “instances,” maybe? I do not know. It is a new form of communication within an app that I do not know how to work with. I also do not know how the ADA rules are going to apply to this brand-new form of communication online through social media that maybe was created after these rules were created. How do I effectively manage that? That is what I think about and worry about.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Do you have any insights on that, Valerie?

VALERIE LOCKHART: Just to go back to that for a second, I think the Instagram feature is more of an in-the-moment thing. It is like, “I am at this thing, I snap a picture, and I share it quickly,” almost like Snapchat. It is a quick-share image that will disappear. The accessibility of those has probably not even been discussed or thought about because it is so spur of the moment. You are posting it quickly and you are not able to edit or anything. I do not think those are going to be accessible pieces of the platform.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Unfortunately, as is often the story with digital accessibility, we are putting the wings on the airplane as it is on the runway.

VALERIE LOCKHART: What I have been focusing on is more on the content side. Is what we are putting out there perceivable and understandable? There are so many neurodivergent folks who may be engaging with that. I look at and audit content in a different way to make sure that it is not just checking all the boxes of accessibility, but that we are expressing things in a way that will resonate with or be understood by the audience.

VALERIE LOCKHART: That is one way I have used AI a lot: to help translate a message or shift my messaging to meet different audiences where they are. A lot of the social media work I have been doing has been looking at how we communicate and whether it will reach the people we need it to reach.

LYNN WEHRMAN: We use AI very similarly to make sure our language is inclusive. That is a fantastic point and a good segue: automation versus accuracy, knowing what to trust when. Valerie, I will have you start us out on that.

VALERIE LOCKHART: As everybody knows, AI hallucinates and makes things up. It is a great tool for getting a first draft of things, but never a final draft without human eyes. It is really easy to use AI to generate social media content, but you still have to have discernment. Go in and look at things. Have people look it over.

VALERIE LOCKHART: If you are translating into different languages, make sure a native speaker of that language looks it over and makes sure it is accurate. That is sometimes hard to do when you are moving quickly, but it can save a lot of pain in the end by putting those check guards in place. It can be detrimental if you put incorrect information out there. AI can help you get 99% of the way there, but you still need that 1% of human validation before you run with it.

LYNN WEHRMAN: We are about to roll out a company-wide AI policy. The key that our director team keeps talking about is that AI is wonderful at organizing our thoughts for things we already know, but we have to be careful and dig into where the sources are from for the things we do not know as much about.

VALERIE LOCKHART: Sometimes we have a blind spot. This happens even when you are reading a newspaper. When it is stuff we know, we say, “Oh, that is wrong.” But then we assume that what we do not know is correct. That is where we need discernment. If you are seeing hallucinations in the stuff you know, you should assume it is happening in the stuff you do not know as well. Do not just think, “That sounds good.” Find somebody who knows that thing and ask them.

LYNN WEHRMAN: It is a little scary. I used it this morning for a restructure of our PR and teams, and it told me how this was going to alleviate my stress. I thought, “How did it know that?” Sometimes it is a little too smart. Abby, automation: how are you using it and dealing with it?

ABBY TEKIELA: This one is tricky for me because, in my industry, our concern and our work is all about water conservation and water quality. As we know, AI systems use a lot of fresh, clean water to process and cool down their systems. At an organizational level, we take the position that we do not utilize AI or automation unless it is baked into different programs we are already using.

ABBY TEKIELA: For example, I use Grammarly a lot because I am an awful speller. Spell check and that kind of thing saves my life all the time, and AI is baked into part of Grammarly. It is a reality. We also use Microsoft 365. I do not personally use Copilot because I do not feel that I need it at this point, and because it feels more like an explicit chatbot. We do not use tools like ChatGPT because of those water resource concerns.

ABBY TEKIELA: When we do access it or run into it within programs where it is baked in, we double-check. You can use it when it recommends changes, but you are not taking that explicitly and copying and pasting it into whatever you are doing. You are always double-checking for mistakes or hallucinations.

VALERIE LOCKHART: It is also good to know that ultimately the responsibility is with your organization. You cannot hide behind a tool for what you publish. You cannot say, “The AI did it.” You published it. You may have used AI to make it, but you were the one who ultimately posted it. It is your organization’s liability, just like with ADA compliance. You are ultimately responsible for that content. There is not an out by saying, “The AI did it.”

ABBY TEKIELA: Absolutely. We are held to a higher standard because we are a local government unit. We operate with tax and levy authority. We are representing the folks within our community who pay that tax and levy. It is important that we use those funds properly and do not make mistakes like posting incorrect information created by AI.

LYNN WEHRMAN: I think it is an important point you bring up, Abby, about the environmental impacts of AI. It is something we all have to be aware of and think about. For us as a group of professionals who live with disabilities, many of us are neurodivergent. AI, for me, was just a godsend. There are studies that show people who are neurodivergent are way more productive with AI than people who are not neurodivergent. For some of us, it does not matter if I am in a depressive episode; something can think for me and move me forward, whereas I might otherwise take days off work to get my brain back.

VALERIE LOCKHART: To piggyback on that, Lynn, those studies are amazing, and it is such a great tool for people. The strides that have been made in the conservation movement on the data center side are actually huge. I have been talking to experts about this because it is concerning, and we are in Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes. We love our water.

VALERIE LOCKHART: But the strides that have been made are massive. Some of the data out there is 20 years old and has not caught up to actual practices with cooling systems. Just like with any industry, there have been massive movements to conserve more water and make these things more efficient. There are closed systems where they fill it once, close it, and it recycles over and over, so it is not using more water. There are lots of strides happening in that area.

VALERIE LOCKHART: I think the last statistic I heard — and do not quote me on this — is that for each prompt, it is like three drops of water. Just to put it in context, our phones use just as much as AI. That is a whole different conversation, though.

LYNN WEHRMAN: We have a few minutes before we go into questions, so that is your cue, audience. If you want to pop anything into the chat, now is a good time.

LYNN WEHRMAN: One of the things I wanted to bring up is something that my team has struggled with: the types of images you use in social media. Is it okay to use infographics? I know we have struggled and made decisions on our team about using certain types of moving images, because we leave the controls to the viewer.

LYNN WEHRMAN: As someone who started in accessibility back in 2008, I remember what it is like to think this is all about one certain type of disability. But as a person who is neurodiverse, I am a visual learner, and I need things to be visually attractive for me to be able to learn from them. There is that side too. Abby, do you have thoughts on what you post and do not post, and how you bridge that gap between the strict sense of accessibility and being inclusive with your images?

ABBY TEKIELA: I think this goes back to what I mentioned before about grabbing key information from your infographic and posting it in the body. I am a very visual person myself. I rely on eye-catching, aesthetically pleasing, interesting things to help guide my way visually through a document.

ABBY TEKIELA: Nothing irks me more than a document that uses incorrect bullet points or little things that distract from the actual content. We still use infographics, and I think they are great. But you need to know where they are being posted, how they are being consumed, and make sure the key information is actually posted in the body so there is an alternative.

ABBY TEKIELA: That way, all the bases are touched. Folks who need the visual side can still engage with the infographic, and someone using a screen reader can engage with the content of the infographic. Nobody is excluded in that process.

LYNN WEHRMAN: That is great. Valerie, any response to that?

VALERIE LOCKHART: I think, to your point, Lynn, as long as you are giving some option of controlling that, I agree it is good to provide both. Obviously, you do not want to use things that are super-fast flickering, because even people without a neurological disorder are going to have trouble with that kind of imagery. You have to balance that out and use things that are slower moving, or where people can control the on and off of it.

VALERIE LOCKHART: With videos, anytime you can provide information in multiple ways, do that. Do not rely on one way. If there are multiple ways to be inclusive, use them. People are at different levels of understanding and engagement. It is important to have multiple ways to engage with anything you put out there, especially when it is important information. Do not rely on one method of communication.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Text and writing for social media is something we do not talk about a lot, because we tend to think accessibility is again about one disability type, usually blindness. But clear writing has a place in social media. Any thoughts on that, Valerie?

VALERIE LOCKHART: Be as clear as you can be. Your messages do not have to be convoluted. They need to be clear and simple. Make it as easy as possible for someone to understand what you are trying to convey.

VALERIE LOCKHART: Again, this is a place where I have leaned on AI pretty heavily, just to help me make sure I am creating the simplest message I can and getting the information out that needs to get out. You do not have to use big words and fancy graphics. It needs to be simple and precise.

LYNN WEHRMAN: One of the things I struggled with as the first accessible communications specialist, probably in state government at the time, was that people who were heads of departments did not understand. I was doing this more in web writing. Facebook was a very new thing at that time. The Department of Transportation in Canada was managing real-time issues on Facebook within transit systems, where someone could say, “The elevator is not working at this train platform.” That was all really cool and brand new.

LYNN WEHRMAN: But the problem I had with website writing was that executive-level people wrote the webpage entirely for people who ran small transit programs and were grant recipients. But the page was about how to catch a bus. It was public-facing. I was battling constantly. Abby, is that something you deal with in government — writing a simpler message and getting pushback?

ABBY TEKIELA: Not from my boss or anything. But I think industry-wide, it is a big concern, especially for myself in education, outreach, and communication: science communication. That is a big deal. I think it may bring you some comfort to know that it is coming down all the way to the undergraduate level. We were talking about it when I was an undergraduate: how to properly communicate science.

ABBY TEKIELA: Something I use a lot is a resource called Hemingway Editor. It is a great way to flag long sentences, repetition, and sentence structure. It is different from Grammarly because it is not telling you what sounds nicer or what is more grammatically correct. It gives you a grade level, like grade 10 vocabulary, wording, and sentence structure.

ABBY TEKIELA: For me, this was illuminating. At one point, I ran a blurb I had posted on our website through it, and it reported back that it was at a post-grad level. That is not the way I want to write for people in the public. People say the public level should be about eighth grade. I thought, “Oh crud, that is bad. I need to bring my writing down to a level that is actually understandable to everybody,” not just someone who likes to use big words.

ABBY TEKIELA: Again, it is not to make myself seem a particular way. I thought it was a negative to be writing like that, and I wanted to improve my writing so everyone in my community and within the district can understand what we are trying to communicate. That is not just for folks reading at different levels. It is also for people who use English as a second language, people who have not had a lifetime of living in an English-speaking country, and people having a day where they do not have the cognitive bandwidth to understand. They just need to get the information.

VALERIE LOCKHART: It helps even for temporary issues.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Great points. I apologize for being a little distracted, and I apologize that someone was advertising their product in our chat. That person has been removed from the webinar. I would like to open up the platform for questions from the audience at this point. Are there any questions, Ellen, that we have out there?

UNKNOWN: I’m sorry.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Oh, she was fielding. Okay. We will just keep talking, then. One thing we talked about a little bit prior to the webinar is something that maybe is not something everybody deals with every day, but is a concern: managing social media interaction and protecting users, particularly users with disabilities, from harassment.

LYNN WEHRMAN: I personally know of someone, a professional I have worked with living with a disability, who was harassed on social media in part because of their disability. It got really out of hand and really ugly. Valerie, I know you have had some experience with this, and I wondered if you would speak to that a little bit.

VALERIE LOCKHART: Everybody has seen it. There are people who feel very confident saying horrible things to people on the internet, particularly on social media. I have been in a situation where I had death threats and people doxing me online. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of legal repercussion for that.

VALERIE LOCKHART: It is difficult to navigate. From a channel perspective, if you are managing that page, there is not a lot you can really do besides having a policy for your page. You cannot kick them off. Being a public entity, you cannot remove people, and you cannot really do anything about their posts. But you can put it out there that you want people to be respectful on your page and remind them to be good human beings. There is not a lot of legal repercussion that can come from somebody being a jerk online.

VALERIE LOCKHART: I ended up in court, and there was nothing that really could be done about the situation until it was too late, honestly. There has to be something that happens beyond just them talking. It is hard to navigate.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Did the court action stop them?

VALERIE LOCKHART: It actually did. Even though there was no legal outcome from it, the action of going to court stopped the behavior.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Okay. That is good to hear. Abby, do you have any thoughts or insights on this you want to share?

ABBY TEKIELA: I think you touched on it. When you are working in the public sector, you are not able to moderate your social media in the same way a private entity can because of the First Amendment right to free speech.

ABBY TEKIELA: If you are looking at a public entity’s social media and there is negative talk or speech in the comments, or someone is posting odd things, know that those entities likely already know about it and are not particularly big fans of it, but they have to respect First Amendment rights. We cannot block people. We cannot delete comments. We cannot hide comments.

ABBY TEKIELA: The one way you can interact with that content is by responding in a general sense of, “Please maintain a level of civility within the comment section.” But often you may see that organizations do not respond to that content. That is the position we often take: we just do not engage. Fortunately, we do not experience a lot of that because we are a smaller local government. But if you are the Minnesota Department of Transportation and it is construction season, people are going to have some nasty things to say about you.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Lots of opinions.

ABBY TEKIELA: Yes.

LYNN WEHRMAN: One of my friends who was a planner used to say that there are only so many Bundt cakes you can take to a public meeting and finally stop making friends.

VALERIE LOCKHART: People kind of forget that social media has become our marketplace. That is the square. That is the town square. That is where people are sharing information. It has to be protected for those reasons. Unfortunately, we do have to allow speech that we do not agree with to happen there because that is where people are going for information. It has replaced that in our society.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Absolutely. We are going to close it out. I am not seeing any questions come in, so clearly you are answering all of their questions. Abby, could you leave the audience with a tip — perhaps something you wish you had known earlier that you know now in social media?

ABBY TEKIELA: I would leave the audience with the idea that this is an evolving process and it is okay that you do not know everything now. With time and practice, you will learn. The process of learning is a wonderful one. You will come out on the other side more engaged and more aware of what you need to do to accomplish your goals with web accessibility. It is okay. It is going to be all right.

LYNN WEHRMAN: This period of time, this extension, using it as a practice period — we felt like we knew so many governments that were going to get sued because they were not ready. You have this time now, and you have saved the money from getting sued that you can now put into not getting sued and creating that sustainable system, giving yourself permission. You have the time now.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Valerie?

VALERIE LOCKHART: I wish I had realized that I could start now. If you start good practices for the stuff you are doing from here on out, this time can be a time to look back, remediate, and look at other things. The good thing about social media is that it is forgotten quickly. It passes quickly. Even if you just start today with the basics, you can build on that and make things better moving forward. You do not have to get stuck on what you did not know. You can literally start, and you have time to remediate the things that live on and will still be there. There is time.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Thank you to you both. We really appreciate the expertise. I am just scouting out our next webinar for July, and I am not seeing the date. Christina or Ellen, do you have it? We are going to be focusing next month on video and streaming accessibility, and we are hoping to have the incomparable Dana Healy on this, who is with MediaScribe, and I cannot remember the parent company.

UNKNOWN: Tightrope Media.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Yes, Tightrope Media. She and I have worked together on a number of education initiatives. Thank you to everybody for coming. Thank you to Abby and Valerie for your information. We will be sending out that handout to the email address where you registered so that you will have that in your inbox by tomorrow.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Thank you, everybody, for attending. Have a fantastic day. The sun is out in Minnesota and it is a beautiful June day, so get outside.

ABBY TEKIELA: Thank you.

VALERIE LOCKHART: Thank you for having us, Lynn.

LYNN WEHRMAN: Have a super day. Talk to you later.